In the Afternoon's Roman Sun
by RowanDarkstar
Summary: As he once saw the Empress in the peasant, now he glimpses the wild pirate in the Noblewoman." - A glimpse of the life of the Empress before we enter her life in "When Fates Collide".


**Disclaimer:** This all belongs to Renaissance Pictures and Universal. I wish I could say it was all mine. Truly I do. But I'm just borrowing this wonderful world with all due respect.  
**Spoilers:** Through "When Fates Collide"

Huge thanks to my spur-of-the-moment beta lexx223!! As always to Teddy E.:) And thanks to amilyn and gbbs10 for best of intentions. ;)

For spikeface so she'll stop hounding me (even though I know this will only make it worse *g*).

**IN THE AFTERNOON'S ROMAN SUN **

by LadyRowan Copyright (c) 2009

He watches her all morning. Sometimes he thinks he's been watching her from the day they met.

The day they met, he believed in his Destiny. And nothing else. Xena was a pawn, a pleasure, a distraction.

She became an indulgence, an amusement, then an asset.

She became a smart decision, an enhancement to his legend. A gifted warrior for Rome. A beloved figure of the people to enrich his own popularity. She became an advisor. And maybe...a friend.

She set his body on fire. She became his wife. She became his nearly exclusive lover.

She became...

He's been watching her from the day they met. Because no one in the known world moves like her. No one stands with him eye to eye and matches every move he makes. No one makes him forget, if only for a moment...about Destiny.

He has learned to keep his friends close, his enemies close. He has never been positive which of these is Xena. He cares for her, probably more than he should. He knows this, has accepted such human weakness and disciplined himself to stick to task. He's not sure he understands love. But he suspects if he has ever truly felt such en emotion, it is indeed tangled up in Xena. But he knows she is a danger. Not for her intelligence, not for her lethal skills. But for her ability to make him forget destiny.

He wonders almost daily if she is his greatest advantage or his greatest mistake.

Then she smiles and brushes her hand across his chest, and he falls in step beside her.

*****

Xena has been off her game today.

No, that's not accurate. And he prides himself on precision and accuracy. Assumptions and generalizations don't win wars, be they by words or by weapons. She was sharp as a blade during the morning training maneuvers in the courtyard; her favored games with Rome's finest, all in the name of training, but as much a show for the confidence of the people as a necessary military task. She sent several of his best guard to the infirmary with treatable wounds. She returned to his rooms with a radiant smile, a deeper tan, and the smells of leather and sweat and blood wafting off her skin. He is both appalled and enchanted by her world of brutality and physical sensation. Not that he isn't a highly skilled swordsman himself, ready to fight when the need arises. But he does not feel he was born to such labors. For him, they are a means toward an end. For Xena...the fight is in her blood. He learned quickly that he would never tame this fire. She embraced all the grace and dignity required of her station. She accepted all the tutors he offered, learned written and spoken languages with almost alarming acuity. She absorbed all the culture and history and innovation Rome had to offer and emerged a gifted politician and negotiator. But through it all her fire remained alive, and he suspects he wouldn't have her any other way.

He learned early that his marriage would fail if he denied Xena her role as warrior. A leader is nothing if he does not understand and nurture his men's (or woman's) strengths. And Caesar is nothing if not a great leader.

It was some time after Xena's morning labors, after she was bathed and dressed and adorned for luncheon that her demeanor shifted. She is distracted. Distanced. Sober. And he can't work out what affected the change.

She is his constant enigma.

He's been watching her, and he notices sooner than he might have when she disappears up the back stairs to their private chambers instead of heading to the outer rooms to entertain the consuls from the southern coast.

*****

"Xena?"

He calls out as he pushes the stairwell door behind him. In these rooms...these elegant quarters...for moments in shadows and under the stars, they are not Emperor and Empress of Rome, but merely Xena and Caesar. Husband and wife. There is a place in his stomach that is soothed by these sensations. The intimacy awakens memories he thought long forgotten. And he thinks this is right, that all great leaders need a place of rest. A place of refuge for thought and inspiration. She can be his replenishment without hindrance in these rooms.

Today he comes as a husband, because he knows her, and he knows something is wrong, and it eats at him when he cannot fix her world.

"Xena?"

"Yeah. I'm in here." Her voice is meant to be light, nonchalant. But there's a hoarseness, a suppressed weariness.

He circles behind the wooden screen, and he can see their massive bed, sheathed in mosquito netting this time of year. She is seated on the far edge of their mattress, her back to the door. She is breathtaking, even from such an obscure angle. Her white gown with gold-braided highlights catches the afternoon sun and she sparkles like a goddess. Her headdress has been removed and tossed to the side. The pins have been pulled from her hair, and the waves of her dark locks fall free down her back and across her shoulders. He takes a step forward and nearly stumbles over the cuff bracelets she wore downstairs. Her sandals lay in a heap of laces a pace further on.

She has ripped off all her confining adornments. He circles the bed with measured steps and takes a seat beside her. He lets gentle fingers smooth her hair from her shoulder and she warms a bit to the touch. Her strands of hair are always smoother than the silks of her gowns. He marvels at how such is possible in her double life of battle and rain and wind. "What is it, my darling?" he prompts. He is nothing if not practiced in his charms. "Have our visitors upset you?"

She is nothing if not practiced in evasion. "No, of course not. It's nothing. I only...craved a few moments of quiet. It's been a tiring couple of days. And I didn't...I didn't get much rest last night."

At this he gives a sideways smile and smoothes his open palm over her sculpted back. "Why didn't you wake me? I'm sure I could have found...some way to relax you." He leans in and places a soft kiss on the bare skin of her shoulder as his fingers trace the steps of her spine, hovering at the small of her back.

Xena offers a half smile that touches her eyes only as a bittersweet glance. "You needed your rest," is all she says. But her gaze is still not his.

He watches her profile in the angling sun, follows lines and planes long ago committed to memory of sight and touch. There is defiance in her chin even as there is a resigned ache in the faint lines at the corner of her eye. As he once saw the Empress in the peasant, now he glimpses the wild pirate in the Noblewoman. She will never cease to surprise him. Two moons ago, at a dinner party awash in Rome's finest, an assassin slipped past Caesar's elite guard and approached his back with a knife. Xena's sharp eyes caught the first movement of violence, and, in her deep burgundy gown of luxurious velvet, she snatched a torch from the wall and blew a mouthful of 500 dinar wine across the flame, blackening the man's face for life. The room fell to shocked silence against his screams, then roared into thunderous applause. Applause his Empress soaked up like water. The glory he understands. He felt pride. And an overwhelming desire to lick the remnants of wine from her chin. They had a very good night after that party.

"Perhaps you should rest a while," he says now. "Our guests will have entertainment enough this evening. I have arranged for another of Aeschylus' plays."

She doesn't respond at first. Then she nods, but doesn't speak. He expected her to shake her head and say she would be down in a moment, play her proper part. He is not angry, only concerned.

"Are you feeling all right? Were you hurt in the field this morning?" He resists the urge to turn her hands over in his like a child's, run his thumbs over the calluses that so sharply contrast the finery adorning her body. He has counted her scars on many a night, asked for stories and the histories written on her body.

"No. No, I'm fine."

"I can stay with you," he declares, more like an Emperor than a husband, but sometimes he can't tell the difference and he knows it. "Our guests can survive on their own for a bit. Rome has more than enough to amuse them for a year, much less an afternoon. I could use this rest before this evening's negotiations as well."

"You don't have to do that," she says softly, more Empress than wife.

He lets his hand resume its circles on her back, his fingers gravitating to the bare skin at her neck, between her shoulder blades. "...or maybe it's time we had an heir..."

He feels her muscles tighten like rope.

*****

The letter still rests at her side, scratches at the skin of her thigh and she almost wishes it would bite through the skin as the roughly crafted words have eaten her from the inside out.

She tried to lose herself in the present, drown in the world of the Empress, the comforts of the familiar and the everyday. She tried to gaze out over this wondrous city from her place high above and forget all that came before. She tried to let it go, let it dissipate on the vast lands and waters between the girl she had been and the woman who walks these palace halls. But she couldn't quite breathe, and she had to escape, break into the open. She pushed back all the windows, pulled the fastenings from her hair, braids and twists so fastidiously worked by her slave girls. She loosed all the confines of her clothing, leaving only silks and soft gold against her skin.

She doesn't want to care, doesn't want to feel. She wants to feel beautiful and needed in this palace of palaces. His hand circling on her back is a warmth and familiar comfort, but she can't meet his gaze and she half wishes he would slip away and let her be lost inside herself a little longer. Numbness is simpler in solitude. She learned this too many years back to count.

An heir...

The thought is more and more on his lips of late, hovering like a ghost between them. She knows they've far surpassed the waiting period he expected when she took him in marriage. If he had his way, they would have a palace filled with heirs.

She tells him things, gives this excuse and that. Everything but the true thoughts haunting her dreams -- that she doesn't want to raise any child to be like her. Or like him. If she were ever to bring a child into this world, she wouldn't raise him to be a warlord, a blood-thirsty warrior, or a blood-thirsty politician.

Sometimes she wants to toss all this power and beauty to the winds, all these privileges and powers she once craved above all else. She wants to clad herself in leathers and armor and simply walk off into the green. To sleep beneath the stars.

She dreams sometimes of a blond-haired blue-eyed little boy who feels so familiar. Heart of a warrior and soul of a prophet.

She would raise her child to be like Lyceus.

Caesar would never understand. Or maybe it's easier to believe such assumptions and never try to explain. In ignorance she can never fully extinguish the hope that...he might.

"An heir," she whispers in return.

She's been seeing Lyceus's impossibly blue eyes in imported silks and river waters and the looking glass beside her bed. Maybe that's why she tried writing to her mother just one more time. Tried asking her to come to the palace.

"Mmmmm..." Caesar's breath is warm against her ear and he places a soft kiss behind her lobe. She shivers as he breathes, "...to pass on our beautiful Rome..."

"I do love Rome," she replies, and she's surprised to find the words have grown from litany into truth. She is Greek through and through, yet this foreign city, with its intellect and violence and art and debauchery and even its ever-present taste of Caesar on her tongue, has wormed its way into her core, and she does feel a kind of pride, a kind of love.

Caesar is Rome and Rome is Caesar and gods help her, she loves them both.

She shouldn't feel so hollow.

Xena sinks a fraction into his touch, letting her weight transfer to his shoulder, and he responds with welcome, snugging his arm around her and touching his face to her hair.

But this small surrender lays her vulnerable, exposes the lies. He feels the quiver in her breath, catches sight of the faint tear track on her cheek. "Xena? Xena, are you crying?"

*****

The power tasted so delicious in the beginning. This man understood her thirsts, her desires, offered her everything she could want to sate her flaming needs. Her hunger in those days was blinding. She was insatiable, wild. Running so fast, even as her legs ached for more.

Time. Time shifts sands, the paths of rivers, the pattern of stars in the sky. And with this shift of stars, she is finding some glimmer deep within her is drawn less to the power and more to the whispers of tenderness. She wonders if she is so humanly weak that it is truly these moments of softness that held her here all along.

She is tired from the running, part of her understands that one day she will have to slow, have to stop. Somewhere. If she doesn't first die by the sword.

"Xena?"

It is an almost involuntary act of surrender as she pulls the scroll across her lap and passes it into her husband's open hand. Her eye once more catches a piece of Cyrene's broken and unpracticed scrawl. She has grown accustomed to the careful and precise writing of the Roman nobles and these simple Greek letters encircle her in a swirl of memory. Dirt floors beneath her fingernails as she knelt before the stifling fire, stirring the evening's soup. The smell of the attic bedroom, the scratchy feel of Lyceus's night shift as he clung to her after a vicious nightmare. The softness of her mother's wild hair as Xena was swept into a laughing embrace.

Caesar's eyes are quickly tracking the words, a single line creasing his brow.

"You wrote to her again?" he states as much as asks, but there is no accusation in the words. Only understanding.

She nods. "I just...I thought perhaps..." She trails off and hates the warmth in her eyes that warps the room like ocean's waves. Her own carefully poured over words have been returned to her, royal seal unbroken. The words, "no longer my daughter" won't recede from her mind's eye.

Caesar lays the scroll aside and turns his attention to his wife.

"I'm sorry," he says, voice deep and rich beside her ear, and she is somehow surprised by the simple sincerity. She doesn't know what she expected, but this wasn't quite it, and she waits on his next words, uncertain of her ground.

He draws a deep breath, chest moving against her upper arm. "Xena..." his fingers play with her hair as he speaks, "the greatest minds in this world, those truly meant to make a difference, find their places in history...they are never understood by those around them. It is the pure nature of the beast. By their very differences these people are capable of rising above the rest, of achieving that greatness. It is a gift from the gods to be set upon such a path. But it can also be...a lonely path."

For the first time since he entered the room, Xena turns and meets her husband's eyes. He holds her gaze with a steadiness so rare in her life and even offers her a soft and tender smile. His hand moves to cup her cheek, pad of his thumb moving the lines of her dampened cheekbone. "But you and I, we are truly blessed by the gods, Xena. Because not only are we destined for greatness in our deeds...but we will have each other at our sides, all the while."

Her throat aches and she needs this moment so badly it almost hurts to hear the words. She lets her lips part as he leans near and responds to his kiss with a passion that is a tangle of pain and need and the urgency of time running out and the vitality of self preservation. She closes her eyes and sees him on the open sea in shining gold and silks with a deep Roman tan and a smirk at the world matched only by her own pirate's heart, and she remembers the moment she fell in love.

Maybe this is all that is real. Maybe this is her destiny and there isn't meant to be anything more. Lyceus's face floats over the waters of Amphipolis and blends into the face of the boy in her dreams, and she thinks for a moment maybe the boy has Caesar's eyes.

His tongue probes her mouth and she pulls at his lip, explores his tastes and textures with equal urgency as they fall back onto the luxurious mattress she has somehow come to take for granted.

"You're so beautiful, Xena..."

She replies only in murmurs and low-throated growls. Words fall away, and she loses herself in a dizzying mix of how this all began and the life she lost in the swirl.

As his hands push away her gown and grasp at her heated thighs, her muscles crave his smooth touch after the strains of the morning's games. She lets her body lead the way.

Sunlight floods through the open windows and bathes them in Apollo's gold as they stretch their lithe forms across the blankets. Her mother's icy words fall to the floor, lost in shadows, and Xena wonders if she dares to believe, if only for this moment, that this devotion, this affection and security, might be real. If this man to whom she has pledged her life and heart might truly mean all he has said. That he might not be with her only for power, for strategy. That he might need her, too.

For a moment in the afternoon's Roman sun, Xena lets herself believe this man with an unfathomable destiny, might love her. Just her. In all her conflicted glory.

As he circles his palm on her eager breasts and presses his heat between her thighs she makes no move toward the herbs on her bedside table. She lets herself believe this man, her husband...will never let her fall.

*****

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